Author: Ashis Chakrabarti
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: May 9, 2002
While the pogrom in Gujarat continues
to worry people in India and abroad, certain sinister developments in Bangladesh
have made policymakers and analysts wonder if this young nation of 130
million, the third most populous in the Muslim world, is also losing its
way into a fundamentalist quagmire. If a collapsing economy, political
uncertainty and a general state of lawlessness prepare the breeding ground
for religious fanatics and their political sympathizers, the situation
in Bangladesh gives enough cause for concern.
The attacks on the minority Hindu
community in the wake of last October's general election were initially
thought to have been more political than communal. Since the overwhelming
majority of Hindus in Bangladesh traditionally support the Awami League,
it was clear that the attacks on the Hindus, mostly by supporters of the
victorious Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its coalition partner, Jamaat-e-Islami,
were cases of political vendetta. But subsequent events suggest a more
pronounced fundamentalist pattern that seems to be targetting leaders of
minority groups as well as secular Muslims. Increasingly, the fundamentalist
strategy of striking at the country's secular roots is being exposed.
Terror struck the Hindu community
and moderate Muslims when four assassins, believed to have close links
with the Jamaat, gunned down Gopal Krishna Muhuri, a leading humanist and
principal of a college in Chittagong district, last November. Attacks on
the Hindu community followed soon after in different parts of the country,
forcing hundreds of the victims to flee to West Bengal and Tripura.
There was another shock wave for
the minority community last month when two minority religious heads were
murdered in quick succession. On April 25, a Buddhist monk was killed inside
his temple by criminals allegedly patronized by a leading light of the
BNP's Chittagong unit. A few days later, a monk of the International Society
for Krishna Consciousness, who was very popular among both Buddhists and
Hindus in the area, was killed at Khagrachari in the Chittagong Hill Tracts
- also inside his temple.
It was the Awami League which had
been crying foul so far over the atrocities on the minorities. There were
also voices of protest from the intelligentsia and sections of secular
Muslims. But the ruling coalition dismissed the protests as part of the
political campaign of the League, which has been boycotting the country's
parliament , charging the ruling coalition with rigging the October polls.
But the government of Begum Khaleda
Zia is now getting more jittery. The reason is that in the past two months,
Zia has faced an avalanche of criticism from international watchdog bodies,
the media and most importantly, the country's donors, who drive the country's
economy. In March, at their annual meeting in Paris, donors decided to
link the future flow of development aid to an improvement in the law and
order situation. Before the last general election, the Awami League lost
much of its urban support because of the lawlessness that gripped most
parts of the country.
To add insult to the donors-inflicted
injury, Denmark recently decided to withhold a $ 45 million aid for Bangladesh's
shipping industry, publicly accusing one prominent minister of corruption.
A congressional caucus on human rights in the United States of America
took the Zia government to task on the issue of the minorities barely two
weeks after the visiting delegations from the Amnesty International and
a Canadian human rights body did the same.
Around the same time, three articles
in respected international media - the Far Eastern Economic Review, The
Asian Wall Street Journal and The Friday Times of Pakistan - rang alarm
bells over the rising fundamentalist threats in Bangladesh. Calling Bangladesh
a "Cocoon of Terror" in a cover story in the Review last month, Bertil
Lintner, one of the best known authorities on Myanmar, complained that
"the government (of Zia) seems powerless and unwilling to stem the tide,
which includes growing attacks on moderate Muslims and the dwindling Hindu
population". He warned the international community of the "deeper long-term
dangers" posed by Islamic terrorist organizations, particularly the Chittagong-based,
al Qaida-trained Harkat-ul al Islami, and their overground supporters making
headway in Bangladesh under the new dispensation. The article in The Friday
Times contained serious allegations of Pakistani attempts to influence
the October polls in favour of the BNP by bribing seniormost officers of
the Bangladesh army.
The shaken Zia government attributed
it all to an international conspiracy to malign the image of the country.
It reacted the way all nervous, guilt-ridden governments do in similar
situations. It banned the Review issue in question, but not the one of
The Friday Times, possibly because the Pakistani paper does not have the
former's international reputation and reach. But the angry zealots were
not satisfied with just that; they bombarded Lintner with hate and threat
mails.
At home, the government now prepares
to do to errant native hacks what it could not do to the foreigner Lintner.
A BNP member of parliament has drafted a bill that will restrict press
freedom in the country as never before. Sent to parliament's standing committee
for scrutiny, the special privileges and powers bill, 2002, provides for
punishment of journalists and watchdog bodies if they publish official
documents or even "insult" a parliament member. Without an opposition to
fight back, the passage of the bill is as certain as its abuse by members
of the ruling coalition. Vincent Brossel, chief of Reporters Sans Frontiers,
the Paris-based press freedom watchdog body, was in Dhaka recently and
warned that the proposed legislation would signal the end of the free press
in the country.
It is not difficult to see why the
government wants to muzzle the press. Dhaka can pride itself on a recent
burst of vibrant, critical and independent Bengali and English newspapers
as well as television channels. In fact, some of these newspapers did a
far better job than Indian newspapers of reporting the atrocities on Hindus
and the government's drift . Some journalists had to pay with their lives
or near-fatal attacks on them. Barring the rabidly partisan papers loyal
to the BNP, League or the Jamaat, the newspaper fraternity in Dhaka and
other towns has shown remarkable professional courage and integrity in
troubled times.
The press in Bangladesh, along with
the country's secular majority and the huge network of nongovernmental
organizations, offers hope that the country's secular roots will hold out
in the face of mounting fundamentalist offensives. For some years now,
the Jamaat has been openly supporting the fundamentalist diatribes against
women's massive participation in NGO work. Its founder, Golam Azzam, who
sided with Pakistan during the country's liberation war against Pakistan,
accuses foreign donors of upsetting the country's "Islamic social base"
by providing loans to women-run NGOs.
Between the Grameen Bank, which
created history by involving rural women in self-employment projects with
a micro-credit movement, the Bangladesh rural advancement committee, that
runs over 30,000 schools and countless other NGOs, a powerful social engineering
has been achieved against the heavy odds of poverty, political chaos and
economic mismanagement.
The fundamentalists are hard at
work trying to change all this - in the religious schools, hospitals and
other institutions they run. For the mainstream Bangladeshi society, they
are still pariahs. But this lunatic fringe has thrown up a challenge which
the Bangladeshis themselves, not the donors or overseas watchdogs, will
have to meet.
